About the Battle of the Mesh Organisers

Freifunk

Freifunk.net (German for: "Free radio") is a non-commercial open initiative to support free radio networks in the German region. Freifunk initiatives exist in many German cities and villages. There are too many to list them all here and their size and level of activity does vary a lot. You might want to look at this page: https://freifunk.net/community

Freifunk.net is part of a international movement for free (as in free speech and in free beer) wireless computer networks. Freifunk has been active with regards to the developing world and in the evolution of mesh routing protocols, open firmware and ad-hoc driver support for wireless cards in Linux.

In 2003 Freifunk started to experiment with mesh networking in Berlin. In the very beginning the mesh experiments were based on the proactive mesh protocol Mobilemesh. In order to support more operating systems Freifunk switched to OLSR RFC3626 in 2004, since there were a number of implementations offering support for other OSes besides Linux. In 2004 Freifunk took OLSR RFC3626 for a large mesh test on the conference Wizards of OS III, involving participants laptops as mesh nodes. The test exposed a number of severe problems. The wireless driver support was very buggy and unstable, causing frequent ad-hoc cell splitting. OLSR RFC3626 didn't perform well.

One major problem of OLSR RFC3626 was the lack of a reasonable metric. So developers from Freifunk Berlin added ETX to the OLSR implementation of Olsr.org. Other protocol modifications addressed routing loops, route flaps and route breakdowns. By the beginning of 2005 the Olsr protocol shipped with the Freifunk firmware had become usable for productive use and some hacks of the Broadcom driver solved the cell-splitting problem for Broadcom-based embedded devices like the popular Linksys WRT54GL. As the mesh technology had become more and more usable, multipoint-to-multipoint mesh networking became the de-facto standard of operation in Freifunk community networks, and the modified OLSR daemon available from Olsr.org became popular for mesh networks worldwide. In 2006 Freifunk developers invented the B.A.T.M.A.N. mesh protocol algorithm. Since 2006 active mesh protocol development at Freifunk is mostly concentrating on the evolution of the B.A.T.M.A.N. protocol.

Funkfeuer

Funkfeuer is a free wireless community network in Austria (Vienna, Graz, Bad Ischl, Weinviertel). It has a couple of hundred roofs in each city and around 500 devices (mesh devices) in Vienna. Funkfeuer.at started in 2003 and has developed in parallel to the Freifunk Networks in Germany. Due to the same language in Austria and Germany, a lot of mutual exchange happened between these networks.

Funkfeuer started the OLSR-NG project (http://www.olsr.org) which expanded the capabilities of the OLSR (RFC3626) mesh routing daemon and made it highly scalable.

Finally, Funkfeuer has it's own server colocation center which is connected to the Vienna Internet Exchange (VIX) and runs on public IPv4 and v6 space.

Fusolab

Fusolab is an association born in 2006, in Rome, and located in via Giorgio Pitacco, 29.

The main target of all the activities, and the association's aim is to develop and spread a critical vision, opposed and alternative to the mainstream social, cultural and economic model through the sharing of spaces, knowledge and tools, implementing it through analysis, research and direct action in the following fields: cultural production (music and art), ethical consumerism, environmental sustainability, information and communication media, active participation in the local area's cultural and social life, inter-culture, access to knowledge, education.

HSBxl

hackerspace brussels is located in the north of Brussels, Belgium; we're keeping our local space afloat - providing infrastructure, for all who want to hack around with open and closed hard- and software, sharing know-how & culture. we organized the second Wireless Battle Mesh edition.